The Pirate Bay is working on a blockbusting web browser

FILESHARING WEBSITE The Pirate Bay is working on a censorship-avoiding P2P web browsing experience.

The website is reacting to pressures from rights holders. It is very unpopular among media firms and in the UK, at least, most ISPs are blocking access to it and some other websites like it.

The Pirate Bay has made a number of changes already, most recently having to do with its domain name and address, and it has also been working behind the scenes on a system that makes the website and its Bittorrent links available to users.

"The goal is to create a browser-like client to circumvent censorship, including domain blocking, domain confiscation, IP-blocking. This will be accomplished by sharing all of a site's indexed data as P2P downloadable packages, that are then browsed/rendered locally," said a Pirate Bay insider to the Torrentfreak website.

"It's basically a browser-like app that uses webkit to render pages, Bittorrent to download the content while storing everything locally."

The Pirate Bay already has its own web browser and that has acquired some 2.5 million users. Released on the 10-year anniversary of the filesharing website, it promised a TOR-based browser bundle. Again, as now, that was pitched as a solution for security and content aware web users.

"Piratebrowser is a bundle package of the TOR client (Vidalia), Firefox Portable browser (with foxyproxy addon) and some custom configs that allows you to circumvent censorship that certain countries such as Iran, North Korea, United Kingdom, The Netherlands, Belgium, Finland, Denmark, Italy and Ireland impose onto their citizens," it explained.

"While it uses TOR network, which is designed for anonymous surfing, this browser is intended just to circumvent censorship - to remove limits on accessing websites your government doesn't want you to know about." µ